He was one of the brightest stars in Hollywood, a hard-charging actor whose intensity on the screen was mirrored in his personal life. As Kirk Douglas grew older, he became less impetuous and more reflective. In this poignant and inspiring new memoir, Douglas contemplates what life is all about, weighing current events from his frame of mind at ninety while summoning the passions of his younger days. Kirk Douglas was a born storyteller, and throughout...

In the six decades since he took to the stage and screen, Kirk Douglas has starred in eighty-three films, nine plays, written seven books, and made a remarkable commitment to humanitarian causes world-wide. Now in My Stroke of Luck, his vivid and very personal reflection upon his extraordinary life, Kirk Douglas finally completes his story by offering a candid and heartfelt memoir of where it all went right. Written in his own words, Kirk offers tender...

More than fifty years after the release of his enduring epic Spartacus, Douglas reveals the riveting drama behind making the legendary gladiator film. In the midst of the politically charged era when Hollywood's moguls refused to hire anyone accused of Communist sympathies, producer Douglas chose Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, to write Spartacus. Now at ninety-five, Douglas looks back candidly, writing from his heart and from his own meticulously...

Young man with a horn: A lonely little boy peeks into the window of a Skid Row dive. Mesmerized by the soaring magic played by a small jazz combo, he longs to create the same sounds. So with the guidance of a brilliant bluesman, the boy develops into a superb artist but as man, struggles with an impossible note trapped in his mind. Bad and the beautiful: Biting drama that tells the story of a ruthless, manipulatve movie producer who lets nothing...